Bob's Christmas cheer

Bob Geldof never did like Mondays. And he shuffles into the sedate Library Bar at the Lanesborough Hotel looking as if this is one of the worst. 'Black coffee,' he croaks hoarsely, 'and water.' When the drinks arrive, he sips at them with his eyes shut; when he finally manages to prise them open, they look like poached eggs. His iron-grey hair is sticking up in wild tufts all over his head.

The night before, he was up until 3am performing at a gig outside Oxford, and clearly he hasn't recovered. 'Normally, after a concert, I won't talk for the rest of the day, so it gives my head a blessed relief,' he whispers in his sleepy Irish brogue, then indulges in a prolonged coughing fit.

At 52, Geldof has no intention of slowing down and taking things easier. For the past two years, he's been touring with his band. Performing some 200 gigs all over the country, he's been playing a mixture of Boomtown Rats hits and new songs from Sex, Age & Death, an album released in 2001, a year after the death of his exwife Paula Yates.

Some of the songs refer openly to the pain and sense of failure he felt when she ended their 19-year relationship in 1995 and went off with the Australian singer Michael Hutchence. Everyone knows what followed. Paula and Michael had a daughter, Tiger Lily, in 1996. Hutchence committed suicide the following year, hanging himself in his hotel room; three years later, Paula was also dead, from a heroin overdose. Geldof's response was to scoop up the orphaned Tiger Lily and take her back home to live with him: an act of extraordinary generosity, though he refuses to see it as such.

Obviously, such wounds are not healed overnight. But Geldof seems to be going through a very public therapy, nightly performing songs such as 'Inside Your Head' whose lyrics could barely be more explicit. 'You got a life, left me for dead/What the f***'s going on inside your head?/So why put a noose around your neck?' he sings.

'I feel a change in myself,' Geldof explains. 'I go down inside myself, I disappear to a place that you really shouldn't visit very often. It's dirty and it's damp and it's dark, and that's where these songs lie. And they get to come out every night and then they go back down there and they live down there. I suspect that place exists in everyone, you just don't need to access it very often. And by doing that, by letting them out and letting them cavort about the stage, like evil imps, you can objectify these experiences. It's not cathartic, but certainly a circle is completed, that's for sure.'

After a gig, he says, he feels 'very calm. The moment on stage is such a complete experience, physically you exhaust yourself, psychologically it's emptying, you're replete. I sleep well after a gig, and I don't normally sleep well. The truth is that if I don't do it, I'll go f***ing mad.' Two years of touring and he has no intention of retiring, ever. 'It's not something I'll ever stop, if I can still be doing a John Lee Hooker thing when I'm 70.'

The irony is that Geldof is famous for all sorts of things, of which his music is probably last on the list. Most famously, he's Saint Bob, organiser of the Live Aid concert which raised around £100 million for the Third World. He's also a multi-millionaire businessman, a founder of Planet 24 (which gave us The Big Breakfast) and Ten Alps Broadcasting ( creators of the Survivor format) as well as an online travel company Deckchair.com (which he launched in 1999, sold in 2001 for £9 million, and which was sold off earlier this year by its subsequent owners for £150,000).

Last year, he got together with Bono from U2 to lobby world leaders to drop the Third World debt; he's also been speaking out about the unfairness of the current divorce laws that separate fathers from their children - an issue particularly close to home since he fought a bitter custody battle with Paula Yates over their children, Fifi Trixibelle, now 20, Peaches, 14, and Pixie, 13.

Doesn't he ever get tired of campaigning? 'Yeah,' he says. 'I feel really tired and weary.' Has he made the world a better place? 'No. It just goes on and on and on. After Live Aid, I was expected to save the entire universe,' he says. 'Give me a break, that's what I say to myself. It should be someone else's turn; people get sick of Geldof and that boring adenoidal monotone. The problem is, I've been grumpy since I was ten.' But his compulsion to right wrongs is as strong as ever, even though it gets in the way of his music - 'the thing I love doing best, and by far the thing I do best.'

That seems a little debatable, though he points out that his successful campaigns have all come through his music, and his consequent access to crowd-pleasing rock stars. What is true is that music has always been his refuge and his own personal salvation. At eight, he was a fan of Helen Shapiro: 'because she had a hit at 11 and I thought, "In three years, I'm going to be this mega rock star." ' His childhood was distinguished by its bleakness. His mother died, aged 40, of a sudden brain haemorrhage when he was just seven years old, and he doesn't remember her, apart from what he calls 'Proustian moments: the lipstick on the china teacup, one hand in a long velvet evening glove'. But the night she died is etched into his memory. 'I remember her putting me on her knee in the bay window of our house to say goodbye, because she had friends with her and they were going out.' Heartbreakingly, he woke up in the middle of the night, thinking he had heard his sister laughing; in fact, she was crying. The following morning, his father came and sat on his bed, in tears, and told him the news.

'The enormity of infinity doesn't register,' he says, 'but of course it affects you forever. It isn't that you pine for your mum, but part of you bleeds all the time.'

When he talks about his childhood, you get a sense of terrible loneliness. The family lived in Dun Laoghaire, south of Dublin. Geldof's father was a travelling salesman, selling towels in order to send his children to fee-paying schools.

'There's nothing more desperate than the bourgeoisie,' says Geldof, 'clinging on by their teeth and nails. He didn't earn much money but all of it was going to paying for our education.' Geldof was sent to the Jesuit school his father had attended, Blackrock College. Though he wears an enormous diamond-studded-crucifix, he says he is not at all religious. Because his father was absent during the week, Geldof brought himself up, cooking his own suppers and spending his evenings alone reading. It left him feeling lonely and panic-stricken.

Physically, I'm here in the Lanesborough,' he says, 'but another part of me is always stuck in another place, in another time, which in my case was a place I thought I'd never get out of. I shared a bedroom with my dad on the top floor of this Victorian building and in my memory this little boy is always looking out of this top floor into the fog. All night I'd hear these foghorns booming, I'd hear them coming up the coast - boom, boom - and I'd lean up out of my bed and see the sweep of the light from the lightship, and always the seagulls screaming in the fog and me lost in the fog.' It's a memory he's put to good use, writing about it in a song 'Walking Back to Happiness', which was, not coincidentally, the title of the Helen Shapiro hit he was, as an eight-year-old, so desperate to see.

His relationship with his father, who still lives in Ireland, was, he says, 'difficult'.

'It's not the best thing in the world to share a bedroom with your dad, y'know.' He adds that his dad is a 'cool guy'.

Geldof began trying to escape Dun Laoghaire as soon as he could. From the age of 16, he was travelling to England during the holidays to earn some money: he heard Neil Armstrong step on to the Moon from the loading bay of a pea-canning factory in Peterborough, where in an early indication of his campaigning instincts, he successfully led a strike to get the casual night workers equal pay with the employees.

He sold hot dogs from a trolley in Shaftesbury Avenue and distributed leaflets for the owner of a Beauchamp Place restaurant, Borscht'n'Tears, who had been arrested for rape and was proclaiming his innocence. 'I used to collect them in the morning and dump them in a bin, then go home to bed.' For a time, he slept rough in a church opposite Holborn Tube; he then moved into a squat in Tufnell Park, where he and his three flatmates were arrested for possession of hashish (planted by the police, he says).

His real dream was to be a writer and, after working illegally on a rock magazine in Vancouver, he decided to start one up in Dublin. Then, one night in the pub back home, his friend Garry Roberts suggested they start a band. 'And then, girls started wanting to shag me,' he says. 'They didn't before, so that was it.'

They may not have been the world's most musically gifted ensemble, but they made an immediate splash - largely due to Geldof's provocative songwriting. 'Banana Republic', an attack on what he calls 'Planet Ireland', accusing the then government of corruption, was banned in his home country (it made No 2 over here). 'All hell broke loose,' he says with a mischievous reminiscent grin. 'Bishops were writing in to condemn it and we were debated in parliament.' There were two number one hits, 'Rat Trap' and 'I Don't Like Mondays', by which time Geldof was hanging out with a petite blonde groupie and music journalist, Paula Yates, who had followed the Rats on tour as a teenager.

Fifi was born in 1983 and Bob and Paula married in Las Vegas in 1986, the year after Live Aid; the bride, by that time a presenter on the teen music show The Tube, wore scarlet. For years, they were simply a cool couple on the London scene. Then Paula did a famously flirty interview with her pin-up, Michael Hutchence, on The Big Breakfast bed in 1995. The same year, she moved out.

For the past eight years, the uxorious Geldof has shared his life with Jeanne Marine, 38, a pretty French actress who found fame in Braveheart; they are not married or, indeed, parents, which is hardly surprising, given Geldof's views on the unfairness of the current divorce laws as regards the custody of children.

Today, though, he has another soapbox he clambers on. He goes into a long and entertaining rant about the petty-minded bureaucracy and what he calls 'shameful risk aversion' of London's borough councils ( Westminster comes in for a particular kicking) and their unwillingness to facilitate the putting on of spectacular public events.

It's taken him over three years but he's finally managed, through a combination of persistence and brow-beating, to co-ordinate a huge project, Brightening Up London, in partnership with the mobile phone company Orange. Nine public buildings have been selected for illumination with seasonal images, as chosen by some of our favourite London celebrities, including Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Damien Hirst, David Bailey, Damon Albarn and Nigella Lawson.

Geldof himself kicked off the event, switching on the lights at Hyde Park Corner's Wellington Arch on 2 December, and turning it from a sedate white monument to a field of cheery sunflowers. Evening Standard readers will be able to vote on an image to cover the National Gallery on 19 December, and all proceeds from the event will go to UNICEF.

As the pièce de résistance, on Christmas Eve, all the buildings will turn miraculously into huge wrapped presents. Geldof, with typical enthusiasm, envisages this as an annual event, with Park Lane totally lit, every borough illuminating its trees and all London's residents putting coloured gels in their windows. 'You'll just walk through this beautiful fairyland,' he says lyrically. Less Saint, more Santa Bob, London's grumpiest celebrity is set to cheer us all up this Christmas.

Orange's Brightening Up London campaign runs throughout December. Evening Standard readers can get involved in the art direction of the picture to be projected on to the National Gallery on 19 December by voting for one of three images. Choose candles, doves or hands to brighten up the National Gallery and simply text 'Hope', 'Peace' or 'Charity' to 82888 from any mobile phone. A percentage of the 25p text will go direct to UNICEF. For more information on Orange's Brightening Up London campaign and to see the images you can vote for, visit www.orange.co.uk/brightlondon